Karl Schroeder Quotes

Something's wrong.
Axel shrugged. That statement probably applies to every second I've spent on this blasted world.

What if they don't surrender?
My Lady, he said, you never ask that question after you've gone to war.

Even the gods fight boredom in vain.

“Then you have no more wish to rule? The country needs you now more than ever.”
She shook her head. “I’ve been crushed under the weight of power all my life. I think I’m going to enjoy missing it.” She laughed at the lightness with which she dismissed royal power. Every moment was a surprise, these days. She hoped that that feeling would never end.

You know I was once a human being, too, Doran. I remember how hard it was to marshal all the resources I needed to cure myself of the affliction. I also remember, quite clearly, how I always told people I had no interest in self-deification. It was a useful and sometimes necessary shield against interference.
Blow off, said Doran. Unless you have some specific threat you want to use on me.
Choronzon laughed. Not a threat. Just curiosity as to why someone so violently opposed to improving on the human model should decide to go against all his principles.
Sometimes, said Doran icily, mature people do things they don't want to do. It's called following higher principles. But someone without mortal concerns, say, like yourself, wouldn't understand that.

Just because something is convincing, that does not make it true. It is merely convincing.

He was acutely aware of how little attention the people who lived here actually paid to their immediate environment. They seemed cut off from their own senses, cocooned away from their bodies in the infinite spaces of inscape. Cybernetic realities were more real to most people now than their own lives, it seemed. And any connection between those internal spaces and the physical world seemed entirely accidental.

Each technology equated to some human value or set of values, she saw. She’d known that. But on Earth, in the Archipelago and everywhere else, technologies came first, and values changed to accommodate them. Under the locks, values were the keys to access or shut away technologies...
The locks proclaimed that there were no neutral technologies. The devices and methods people used didn’t just represent certain values—they were those values, in some way.

“The fact is, there’s no such thing as an ultimate state of consciousness. It’s a myth; sentience has meaning only insofar as it’s connected into the physical world...
If you’d like to see it, here’s a view of the Omega Point.” It gestured to open a large inscape window in the sky. Instantly Doran’s head was filled with an undifferentiated roar; white noise matched in the window by endless video snow.
Choronzon laughed. “The more information there is in a signal, the more it resembles noise. You’re looking at infinite information density, gentlemen, a signal so packed with information that it has become noise. These idiots pushed so far in one direction that they ended up at the opposite pole...
Perhaps the fanatics of Omega Point had gotten their wish, but if so they had been mistaken in thinking that the Absolute was something that hadn’t been there all along. Absolute meaning, it seemed, was no different from no meaning at all.

We're all pretending; that's what events like this are all about.
"Why are we doing it at all?"
"To fit it. Better that we be there to be spoken to than absent to be spoken about."

It's time to abandon the plans of the entity that enslaved me all these centuries, he said. And time to start making my own.

But what good's abundance if nobody can experience it?

All sound is music, he had said, and there is no place without sound.

That’s what being human means: to be master of your own fate.

She looked up at the towering wisdom and felt a sudden love for it—as if these books were family.